What was the top story hogging media headlines in India this last week? The open rebellion by the Gujjar people of Rajasthan against the state, that has left about 30 dead in two days? The exploding rate of inflation? The fact that an all out state of civil war exists in Nagaland, with rival groups fighting each other with mortars and machine guns in the streets of the commercial city of Dimapur? No.

It was all about the murder of a 15 year old girl of NOIDA (a Delhi suburb), Arushi Talwar, who was found in her bedroom ten days ago with her throat cut and her head smashed in. First suspicion fell on the family servant, Hemraj, who was missing – but a neighbour later found his corpse on the roof, showing that the police were, let’s say, not exactly on top of their form.

Later, Arushi Talwar’s father, a dentist, was arrested for both murders. According to the official version, which keeps changing, Talwar had chanced upon his daughter and the servant together in “objectionable” circumstances, and had killed them both in a fit of rage. Alternatively, Talwar had had an affair with a colleague, and Arushi had objected, so he killed her (good riddance to the little busybody, wouldn’t you say, hm?), and the servant for good measure. Maybe tomorrow they’ll come up with yet another theory.

While the police case has more holes in it than a colander, it’s not that I’m concerned with right at this moment. I don’t really give a damn who actually killed this girl – as long as he gets punished eventually.

What I give a damn for is that,

First, the putative murderer, Arushi’s dad, has been tried, convicted, and all but executed by the media, something which routinely happens in India where the police and media treat accused as though they are automatically guilty. Unlike Britain, where the police say things like “A 30 year old man was taken into custody” and leave it at that, the police hear share every little titillating bit with the media while investigations are even still ongoing.

Now, after being convicted by media trial, just suppose the police version (which as I said is fragile at best) fails to stand up in court and Talwar (whether guilty or not) is released. Will he gain his professional reputation back? I say this also from my viewpoint, because I have a lot of crazy patients, and suppose one of them accuses me of something. How do I prove my innocence if the media decides in advance I’m guilty? Even if I’m absolved, how do I get my life back?

Then, with all the pressure of media coverage, isn’t it now imperative to find Talwar guilty, by concocting evidence if need be? So many reputations are riding on this now.

Secondly, as I said before, there are so many other and more important bits of news that are totally ignored by the media. I just wonder – suppose Arushi wasn’t a rich man’s daughter, not one of the members of what the Great Indian Muddle Class considers People Like Us. Suppose she had been poor (or at least lower middle class), ugly, fat and (oh, horrors!) dark. Would the media have spent a single moment reporting on this at all?

You know the answer, don’t you?

In this post we had a bit of an argument going as to who, precisely, was most to blame for the rape-murder of Scarlette Keeling (in picture) in Goa. I’d said her mother, Fiona McKeown, was as much to blame as any of her actual killers, for leaving her alone in a foreign land.

McKeown, of course, is playing the sympathy card for all she’s worth, and is getting sympathy from people who should know better – in the media and also elsewhere.

I wasn’t exactly surprised, though, when English media began telling the world the truth about McKeown herself:

She lives in a broken down trailer in Devon, in scenes of squalor, with her family using sleeping bags instead of beds; she had nine children with five men, and none of those children has attended school. All of those children are consumers of alcohol, and the eldest broke his neck in the recent past in a car accident. She once did a year in jail for attacking a man with a knife. She knew Scarlette was using drugs and having sex, and she was “OK with that” – in her own words.

Doesn’t quite sound like the ideal family McKeown claims she had, does it now?

As for Scarlette’s experience in Goa – she told a friend that she was terrified at having been left all alone and without money, and she was sleeping around because at least that gave her food and some kind of shelter. Poor kid.

Meanwhile McKeown’s going around telling everyone she’s convinced the real killers of her daughter are yet to be arrested. It sort of keeps her in the limelight, doesn’t it? And the Indian media, at least, are swallowing her act whole.

And this is the woman who is, absolutely certainly, going to make her daughter’s murder her ticket to a book deal and big-time success. Just watch.

Even hanging by the intestines is too good for her.   

Interconnections…

Two different news items, on the same issue of The Times Of India, caught my eye.

The first was one from England which said British parents now consider childhood to have ended at eleven – the age where children transit from primary to secondary school – and, in increasing numbers are allowing their children to drink alcohol at home, dye their hair and wear make-up, stay out alone after 11 pm, and have sex with their boyfriends or girlfriends into the bargain; allowing them to spend the nights over.

The second was from much closer home, in Goa, where, on the 18^th of February, a fifteen year old British girl named Scarlette Keeling was found dead on the beach, wearing only a bra, with bruises over her body. The police initially said she died of drowning, but she was a good swimmer. Also, she was not just half nude but had recently, said the pathologist who conducted the autopsy, had sexual intercourse. The pathologist found no way of telling if it was consensual.

Keeling had come over with her mother, one Fiona McKeown, who had left her daughter alone in Goa and gone off to Karnataka, further south – and McKeown raised a ruckus that her daughter had been raped and murdered, and that the authorities were hushing it up (well, of course they were. A kid’s rape-murder isn’t good for business.) Since, and only since, she was a foreigner, and since this had the potential to affect tourism, the police re-opened the case.

Immediately some interesting things came up. This girl was rather well known to the locals, since she usually hung around with well-known drug pushers and was a heavy drug user herself. Even the mother admitted this. According to the locals, she (the daughter) used to “pay in kind” for the drugs since she never had any money. Now there’s a euphemism for fucking if I ever heard one!

And at 4 am on the day she died – just three hours before she was discovered dead on the beach – she had left a bar with two men, so drunk she could barely walk.

Of course The Times Of India, which I have previously categorised as India’s worst newspaper, didn’t attempt to find any linkages at all between the two reports even though they were almost on the same page. It wouldn’t. But as far as I’m concerned, if Keeling was in fact raped and murdered, her mother was as guilty of the crime as the actual perpetrators.

It’s just another proof of what I’ve been saying for years – they should conduct aptitude tests before allowing anyone to become parents.

Knowing my parents, I wouldn’t have been born then, of course.

In the same building as my clinic is a furniture store. This store does a fair to middling amount of business and tends to charge around the higher end. Well, and so what?

So this: the salesmen and the furniture deliverymen who work in the store have a nice little sideline going: they sell furniture of virtually all sorts on the sly, at just about half the official price. They are doing so well at it that pretty much everyone in the building and their neighbours, relatives and friends have been buying from them.

Apparently the owners – who are Marwaris, a community from Rajasthan who are business people first, foremost and always – don’t have a clue.

Now I’m no businessman, but if I were in that position even I’d wonder why so much of my stock keeps mysteriously vanishing.

I can’t – try as I might to celebrate the cheating of capitalist moneybags by underpaid workers, I just cannot – accept that these people don’t know what’s going on. No.

This leaves one with a choice of two possible solutions:

Either the owners know about it and think a certain level of pilferage is acceptable…but knowing the average Indian businessman I think this unlikely in the extreme;

Or, the owners know all about it and are actually orchestrating it.

Let me explain how this works.

You take an item of furniture, say a table, costing (in reality) about, oh, Rs 500. You mark it up to Rs 1000. Nobody will be too eager to buy at that price. Then you get your salespeople to “secretly” offer it on sale at Rs 600 as “stolen property”…and instantly it’s snapped up, the money ultimately coming, of course, to you. You not only end up with a hundred rupee profit on what you’d have got without the whole shenanigan, you also get a lot of free word-of-mouth publicity that will draw in new customers…as is happening.

I leave the reader to decide which of my solutions is the more likely.    

The usual form of child abuse, the one we're all familiar with, is the one where children as young as four or five are sexually abused and/or put to work.

In Delhi and also here in Jaipur, I discovered another way.

It started sort of "innocently" enough. Since I was accompanied by a European woman, and since I myself am often mistaken for a European, the usual kids trailing after us wouldn't have surprised us. It became odd when they began asking for money even to be seen in our company; I remember a boy, aged around ten, on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi asking for fifty rupees straight out. These are also children who would normally be expected to be in school during the day. They weren't dressed like the usual street kids, after all.

What it works like is this. The parents, even in this day and age, have so many children they can't begin to feed and clothe and take care of them all. They basically feed them breakfast and throw them out of the house for the day with orders not to return till sunset and often not to return without a certain amount of money - be that whatever amount. The parents don't care how the child feeds itself during the day, just that the money comes in.

Also, I wrote a year or so back about a kid the media named "Prince" who fell into an uncovered tube-well. When he was rescued by the army after a couple of days (in the full glare of TV cameras) politicians descended on his family and his village with promises of largesse. Predictably, even as the media swiftly moved on, there was a rash of other kids in India falling into wells. Most died, of course, but the phenomenon isn't quite over yet. Either kids have a magical tendency to fall into wells, or parents are deliberately throwing their children into wells in order to reap a windfall like "Prince's" family. I think some of you my doubt this; but when a couple has at least six or eight children they can't feed, they are often willing to risk "expending" one in the expectation of gaining a lot in material terms.

Of course, this doesn't figure in the calculations of Indian politicians. The idea of restricting population growth has long since been abandoned; it's even called a positive thing, a "demographic dividend".

So expect many more kids asking for money or falling into wells.

They call it “eve teasing”. Sounds like it’s a little game.

If you’re in India and you happen to turn on the TV, you can’t miss the thing that’s overtaken Benazir Bhutto in hogging media attention.

This is the stripping and roughing up of two young women, both American citizens of Indian origin, in the early hours of January 1 by a mob of up to eighty men. This happened bang in the middle of Mumbai (Bombay), which loves to pretend to be the one city of India where women are always safe.

The whole incident was copiously photographed and it was only much later that the police arrived. They didn’t do much except rescue the victims, who chose not to register formal complaints. (According to victims of previous abuse, complaints would not have helped them anyway. One said her assailant was arrested and released on bail, after which he turned up on her doorstep to threaten her and demand a refund of his bail money, He could have got her address only from the police.)

Only after a media outcry was the police forced to register complaints against the men involved, some of whom have reportedly been arrested. I’m curious to know if any action will be taken against them, even though the evidence (in terms of the photographs) would seem to be conclusive.

The police chief of Bombay had gone on record (Freudian slip and all) to say “Don’t make a mole…a mountain out of a molehill. Such little incidents can occur anywhere.”

And I'm not even mentioning the rapes going on literally every minute somewhere in this land... 

The reasons aren’t all that far to seek: a sex-starved country with an extremely high level of latent violence which puts no price whatsoever on the dignity or well-being of women. But this will never be admitted by a society where women are counselled by police to cover up if they want to avoid being raped or molested and where a rapist can say “You must understand – sometimes a man has no choice.”

Someone should tell the women that.

Some people like to pretend everything comes as an amazing shock.

You long timers on this blog will know of my steadfast opposition to civilian ownership of guns. I’ve written about it many times before and got a lot of hate mail as a result from people who, probably, don’t own guns themselves but just like the idea.

Nor have I been the only one opposing guns – and after Cho Seung Hui’s (in my opinion, somewhat over-publicised) rampage earlier this year, you’d have thought some people in this country (the pro-gun group being America-worshippers to a man) would perhaps change their minds and decide that – just  possibly - guns weren’t the best thing ever to have been invented. Apparently, you’d have been wrong.

So, in July one of India’s less bad newspapers (there are hardly any good ones, just a difference in degrees of hopelessness), The Hindustan Times, ran a feature pitying the poor forlorn gun owners who (gasp) could buy only three guns of limited calibre on one licence, even if they got a licence in the first place. The poor things! They have to actually prove they need a gun before getting a licence for one, what an infringement on their freedoms! And then the guns are all junk…oh, what a bore.

I need hardly say the guy who blogged about this article, ridiculing it, came in for a rash of vulgar abuse from the crowd I mentioned.

Now a few days back, something just waiting to happen, something I’d expected would happen long ago, finally did. In Gurgaon, a consumerism driven quasi-suburb of Delhi, two schoolboys brought a gun to school and shot dead a third. The operation was well planned – they brought the gun to school, hid it in the loo somewhere, and shot the victim as he was about to board the school bus at the end of the day. The motive was, allegedly, that the victim was a “bully” and that the two budding psychos (now in a remand home and completely sans remorse) who shot him were seeking revenge.

Apparently, the dad of one of these two young killers (they fired several shots at the victim, passing the gun from one to the other), a rich real estate dealer, had left a loaded gun at home near the television set and gone out of town. His gun licence had been given him for purposes of “personal protection”. I would, automatically (given the facts of the case) assume that then he did not need protection when out alone in the wide world away from his normal haunts, and wonder when, therefore, he did need protection, and from whom. But it gets even more interesting than that. The gun didn’t even belong to him. It belonged to a friend of his…and he had it, loaded, near his TV set. Incidentally, he had also taught his son to shoot. An essential survival skill – I think not.   

From the media reaction, you’d have thought that for the first time ever it suddenly became common knowledge that Indian people owned guns and that gun ownership had become a sort of status symbol among the noveau riche and the upper middle class. The same media which was whining about the plight of the poor gun owners suddenly began breast beating on the appalling lack of gun control in India…apart from (and this is matter for a separate blog entry) the stresses on Indian schoolchildren that made them start bullying or prone to violence (that many other sources deny the victim ever bullied anyone is neither here nor there – they contradict each other on everything about him except his name; they contradict each other on his personality, academic record, sports interests, etc, you name it, they disagree on it). Right now I’m talking about the guns.

I’m sure that as soon as the media furore dies down, and it’s back to business as usual, someone or other is going to argue in favour of all schoolchildren being allowed to carry guns in order to defend themselves from one another. It’s only a matter of time.  

Anyone who thinks guns are necessary or should be handed out to civilians on request, which is what 'liberal licensing policies', so called, amounts to, should have their head examined. And I am not just talking about the Gurgaon school shooting. I have myself picked shards of bone and pellets out of the exploded face of a kid who had been shotgunned at close range. I used to see at least one gunshot wound a week in my intern days. Most of them were allegedly “accidental” shootings from licensed, legal, weapons.  

All over the papers these days is the increasing comment about vigilantism. There was, a couple of weeks ago, a very major clash in Guwahati between Adivasi protestors and Assamese locals (remember my post about that?). I can just imagine the situation if one or both sides had had free access to firearms. The Wild West would have had nothing on it.

It's a specious argument to say that firearm possession will either act as a deterrent or reduce crime. People in India who cite gun laws in the US and claim gun ownership reduces crime never actually, one can’t help noticing, provide figures. And of course if they ever quote anyone they quote the National Rifle Association, which is hardly a neutral body.

Incidentally, I am sure you'll have noticed that the number of incidents of shootings in the US is on a steady upswing in the last few weeks.

There are a few of standard arguments by the Indian pro-gun group about gun laws:

1. Liberal Gun laws will prevent crime

 Sure they will. The robber will be so terrified of your locked-down, unloaded gun he won't ever think of entering your house. Give me a break. And if you load it and keep it out in the open, then, well, see what I just wrote.

2. Licences should be handed out after gun safety courses, PROVIDED the safety course isn't made an excuse for denying licences

Excuse me? Did you notice that in this country you can get a driving licence without ever having sat behind a steering wheel in your life? What about the proud gun owner who lent his friend the gun the friend then left loaded on his TV set so his gun-trained psycho son could go shoot someone with? Does a gun safety course ensure future compliance?

3. Gun control won’t prevent suicides or murders – would be suicides and murderers would find some other way.

I’ve attempted suicide thrice, as I’ve said before, and it was only my incompetence at poisoning and hanging myself that kept me alive. If I’d had a gun I would not have been alive to write this today. And as for murders – if you have a lethal weapon ready to hand, it seems to me, it makes murder more likely than if all you have to go at your target is a nail file or a bread knife.  

There is no point in comparing, as gun lovers love to do, gun-owning countries like Finland or Switzerland with India - and even in Finland there was a major shooting recently. With liberal social and sexual mores, far lower social and political tensions, and minimal environmental pressures such as catastrophic overcrowding, the people there are much less violent (anthropologists have long noted that sexually repressed societies, and overcrowded societies, are more violent. Here in India we have a society that is both sexually repressed and overcrowded). India, unless you're deaf and blind you can't help noticing, is an extremely violent society, one which is getting more violent by the day.

I said it before and I’ll say it again – no civilian has any legitimate reason, in today’s world, for owning a firearm, anywhere. But then the Indian gun lovers don’t mean that anyone should have ready access to guns. What they mean is that upper middle class people like them should have ready access to guns. But you can’t make laws for only one set of people based on economical criteria, so the hoi polloi will have guns too.

Can’t have your cake and eat it, baby.    

So you all love or like or are at least to some extent interested in India. Right?

Guess what, it’s time – again - to face up to the truth.

Sometimes I imagine that we live in a civilised country, one that at least has some kind of rule of the law. Each time I’m swiftly disillusioned.

On Saturday 24 November, in Dispur, the suburb of the city of Guwahati that functions as the makeshift capital of the state of Assam, something happened. This something is what I want to tell you about today. Please read it carefully and pass it on if at all you feel that it is worth passing on.

First: some background.

Earlier in this blog I’ve talked about India’s peculiar form of “affirmative action” – the idea that social justice can be achieved by reserving employment and educational positions for the “lower” castes and tribes, regardless of individual economic status and ability. It’s played havoc with Indian society for the last fifty years and promises to keep causing havoc for the foreseeable future, because it’s too valuable a tool for the politicians to ever let go of.

Inevitably, therefore, the beneficiaries of this are the people who are numerous enough to matter politically…who can influence election results by their votes. Also, predictably, the castes and tribes who have been granted reservation will do pretty much anything to stop other castes and tribes from being granted reservations also – because it would cut into the pie of reservation. You cannot, after all, reserve more than a hundred per cent of jobs and college positions. So, if you’re a backward people of little political relevance, you will get neither reservation nor any other help – you’re really not of any importance. You may as well not exist.

Such was the position of the Adivasis of Assam.

Who are the Adivasis? The word “Adivasi” means “Aboriginal”. They are members of a clutch of tribes – Oraons, Santhals, Mundas, Kheroas, Murmus and others – whose forefathers were brought by the British as forced labour (just as the British exported Indians as slave labour to the Caribbean and South East Asia) to work in the tea gardens of Assam. Their original home is in Central India, in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Chattisgarh, and their largest numbers are still to be found in those states. Although they belong to different tribes, they mostly look the same – curly haired, flat nosed, sturdy, and their skin colour is the mahogany brown of the East African, with whom it’s not impossible that they share genetic origin. They are also, all, without exception – even in their original states – marginalised and neglected, so that they are among the most enthusiastic recruits of India’s armed Maoist rebellion. In those states they have been given Scheduled Tribe (ST) status – which entitles them to reservation. But not in Assam, where a section of them briefly rebelled under a group known as the Adivasi Cobra Militants of Assam (ACMA) which is now in a state of “ceasefire” with the government.

Four years ago, the Chief Minister of Assam, Tarun Gogoi, urgently needed every vote he could scrape together to win the elections to the state legislature. He then had to, at last, turn to the Adivasis, who had been given hitherto nothing – no schools, no housing, no drinking water fit for a human, nothing. Standard practice, in fact, for India, where you matter only if you’re rich or upper middle class. Well, as I said, the Adivasis, who are among the few groups who could have profited from the dubious benefits of reservation, were suddenly of some political importance and were promised ST status and reservations “within ten days”. Tarun Gogoi won the election, and – surprise, surprise – promptly forgot his promise. Four years went by, Adivasi labourers began to literally starve to death or die of diarrhoea (more than a hundred died, so that the government of Assam said the tea garden owners should be booked for murder) in tea gardens, and finally the All Adivasi Student’s Association of Assam (AASAA) decided to call a rally in Guwahati in protest against governmental and industrial neglect. This was called for 24 November.

Now – as is becoming increasingly clear – the state government’s intelligence agencies had warned of mounting Adivasi anger and the probability of violence, and had pleaded for some kind of security arrangements during the rally. The government did nothing. (I’ll refer to the excuses they made for doing nothing in a moment.)

So what happened? Thousands of Adivasis streamed into Guwahati for the rally. As is the norm in India, many of them didn’t even know why they were going – they were told to go, so they went. Some of them were leaving their native villages for the first time in their lives, excited at the prospect of seeing a big city. There were men and women with babies, teenagers and children, all brought in by bus. The rally was supposed to be held in a field. Permission had been given by the government for the rally, but not for a protest march planned to be taken from the field to the state legislature. So a protest march was illegal. OK so far?   

Again, let me make a couple of things clear. In Indian politics, just saying a march or a meeting is illegal has no effect at all on anything. At most it makes the march or whatever more likely because of the chance of politically rewarding symbolic arrests. Everybody knows this. The state government could not but have known it. Yet they arranged no security cover, did nothing. Apparently they thought just banning the march would stop it from occurring, which personally I find incredible. But that’s their excuse.

Secondly, violence is an intrinsic part of Indian politics. It happens everywhere and is to be expected at every major political rally, especially when the rally is all about “protests”. The state government, therefore, knew a march was going to happen and it would more than likely turn violent – and it still did nothing.

Well, so the rally turned into a march to the state legislature even before all the Adivasis brought into the capital had quite finished arriving at the field. According to the AASAA organisers, the rally had turned into a march by the time they, themselves, had arrived at the rally venue. This may or may not be true, but it has little or no connection with what happened next.

According to the official story, this is what happened then:

Trouble began when thousands of Adivasi or tribal people, backed by the All Assam Adivasi Students' Association (AAASA), took out a protest march through the city streets demanding scheduled tribe status.

"Residents of Guwahati and the protesters clashed in the streets after the agitators went on a rampage damaging about 100 vehicles and destroying shops. The angry locals retaliated by attacking the protesters," a senior police official said wishing not to be named.

More than 130 protesters were injured in the attack.

Police fired teargas shells to disperse the protesters when they tried to break a security cordon to take out the march through the city streets.

"Local residents armed with sticks and iron rods, besides crude implements, attacked the fleeing protesters and beat them mercilessly," Parag Moni Aditya, a witness, said.

"The mob attack took place after the protesters started damaging vehicles and shops belonging to commoners in the area," the police official said.

The official story, as fleshed out by reporters, goes on that the protestors, who were armed with bows and arrows, smashed up cars and buses, vandalised shops, beat up people at random, and then only when they had almost reached the state assembly did the police beat them back with batons and tear gas, and by firing in the air. The protestors then broke and ran for cover, and this was when the local residents, who had been at the receiving end of the protestors’ violence, came out to take revenge and beat up anyone they could find in retaliation, for hours on end. The police then finally managed to calm things down and take the injured to hospital – the Guwahati Medical College Hospital (GMCH). The final death toll was one dead and “up to 300” injured. 

This story stinks.

In the first place, the Adivasis have always taken out rallies with bows and arrows. The bow and arrow is an integral part of Adivasi culture, as intrinsic to Adivasis as maroon robed monks are to Tibetan Lamaism. Adivasis use the bow and arrow as a cultural symbol, and many of them are good archers. India’s Olympic archery team is largely composed of Adivasis. Taking out a rally with bows and arrows does not connote hostile intent, any more than Indian Sikhs brandishing swords means that they are about to chop someone’s head off.

Then, even after the Adivasis allegedly smashed up a (widely varying in different reports) number of cars and beat up people for “an hour” and more, when the GMCH released a list of injured, of the 188 names (as reported in the Assamese newspaper Asamiya Pratidin) all but eight were Adivasis (easily recognised by their surnames) and only two were local residents of Dispur. Adivasis smashed up cars and shops and beat up people for an hour – and only two locals were injured enough to be hospitalised?

Now, another thing. Of the 180 Adivasi injured, the majority were young and female – in their teens. Even according to the people on the spot, the “violent” Adivasis all got away and it was the remainder – the women, children, and the villagers who had come to see the city – who were chased through the lanes and beaten.

Then, according to what we in the North East of India saw on our television screens – and as you can see in the photos – the police, far from “cooling things down” – enthusiastically joined in beating the protestors, even those who had been arrested and surrounded. They were hounded like the fox hunt, dragged out of whatever shelter they could find, and beaten with anything the mob could lay hands on – iron rods, planks studded with nails, bricks, stones, anything.

So this is what happened. The fleeing protestors ran from the police tear gas and batons into unfamiliar lanes where they were scattered, alone, and surrounded and annihilated by hordes of people armed with everything from sickles to cricket bats. At least one woman was stripped naked (see photo) and chased down the street while onlookers took photos with cellphone cameras.

Some of them dived into ditches and entered houses looking for shelter. A few found protection – one of the photos shows an Assamese man stopping the mob from beating an Adivasi woman lying on the street.

Most did not. Dragged out of hiding, they were beaten till corpses littered the street – the unofficial death toll is 20, and among the photos I posted are those of corpses, one of them in a ditch.

However, the official toll remains at one. I wonder what happened to the rest? Did they turn into zombies and get up and walk away? Do we have Dr Frankenstein at work here?

As for the rest, even after arrest, they were beaten by the police and the locals, and humiliated by making them catch their ears and do sit-ups (a punishment used for children in Indian rural schools).

Now what did the Indian media do? The response was curious and bizarre. If you’re Indian, you will probably know of the Nandigram episode in the Communist-ruled state of West Bengal. If you don’t, just click on this link for details. It was used by the ultra-pro-American Indian media to put pressure on the Communists, who are the main obstacle in the way of turning India into a camp follower of the US. The Nandigram episode, with the riots in Calcutta that followed, was (and is) being made great use of by the Congress party of India’s so-called “prime minister” Manmohan Singh (who loves to be photographed being patted by George W Bush like a pet dog) to put the Communists on the defensive. The news of Nandigram and the Calcutta riots played on Indian media, both print and electronic, for weeks. Endlessly, over and over and over.

But Assam is ruled by the same Congress Party.

Now, on the evening of 24^th November, the “mainstream” news channels (NDTV24x7 and Headlines Today) began running the Guwahati riots as “breaking news”. Then, suddenly, without any explanation at all, and within an hour, the “breaking news” disappeared – and very soon after that (within the early evening) all mention of the Guwahati riots disappeared from the TV screens. And this from channels which are so eager for scoops they compete to cover drunk actors and homeless models. Amazing or what? 

Only the local channels of North East India and the local newspapers covered – and continue to cover – the aftermath. The “mainstream” media prefer to spend their time on a movie festival in Goa and on the ridiculous and manipulative (not to mention unreadable) Taslima Nasreen (who just happens to be another stick to beat the Communists with).  

Now, as I said, the Adivasis still live in large numbers in Bihar, Chattisgarh, and most of all in Jharkhand in Central India. It’s therefore an emotive issue in those parts, and politicians from those states arrived to check things out for themselves (the idea was to get publicity – not for any social service, please understand that). Well, when one of them – Arjun Munda, the former Chief Minister of Jharkhand – arrived in Guwahati, he went to the GMCH to see the wounded. He saw that they were being somehow patched up and dispatched to their villages as fast as possible. Even those who were desperately injured, with fractured skulls and so on, were being sent back to villages where there are no health facilities at all.

Somehow, this does not come as a surprise. If you can’t see the dead and the wounded, they might as well not exist. This is something that Indian politicians have known for long. Also, if they don’t exist, they do not need to be given financial aid.

And if they die once they return to their villages, that’s the end of the matter. They will have died of anything but their injuries – or so the report will claim. This is the country where tribal people who died after eating rotting mango seed kernels because they were starving were said to have died because they got food poisoning after they ate a “traditional food”, after all.

The Assam state government of Tarun Gogoi’s Congress Party has "transferred” a couple of junior policemen. No further action has been taken. None of the men who assaulted fleeing protestors, even though clearly caught on TV and photographs, has so far been arrested. 

I have two requests.

The first: If you care about what I have written in this blog post, please pass this on to your various online fora. The facts are being hidden, not just from the world, but from the people of India.

The second: these Adivasis are mostly highly exploited labourers in the tea gardens of Assam. Please stop buying Assam tea. Your money will only go to fatten obscenely rich garden owners, while the labourers will continue to die.

I apologise for the quality of the photographs, but, as usual, I had to cut them out of papers and scan them. They are not available online any more – if they ever were.

This is the reality of our “emerging superpower”.

The first was of the rape and murder of a call centre worker – a 22 year old woman on her last night on the job – by the driver of the vehicle sent to pick her up and a friend of his. They, contrary to regulations, picked her up first (female staff aren’t supposed to be picked up first or dropped off last under the regulations just in order to prevent this sort of thing happening). The call centre just said they hadn’t expected her to turn up at all and hadn’t thought about it again.

Now this made a big stir because this sort of thing had happened before and there are regulations in place to stop this sort of thing from happening. But those regulations are hardly ever followed because they would increase operating costs (like having security guards in each vehicle and using women drivers for woman workers – because of the nature of their jobs, these women are generally picked up and dropped off in the late hours of the night) and because of general sloppiness. However, since call centre operators are a privileged species as far as the media are concerned (and never mind what sort of stressed out lives they actually lead) it made a big enough stir that for a few weeks they might actually put some security in place. It will only be a few weeks, of course, before the cost-cutting kicks in and things go back to the same old place.

The second bit of news also concerns call centres. Apparently the rate of attrition of workers (who have to be trained and accustomed to the work, abuse, accents, faux American identities and all, don’t forget) is so high the companies are now offering them MBA courses to make it worth their staying on.

Now, of course, MBA courses cost money, and this must come out of the call centre’s profits. Which makes one wonder just how much they take in that they can afford to give away MBA courses and yet can’t afford to let their employees form unions or have a minimum level of security.

Now, of course, call centres are outsourcing operations. Which means you hire someone abroad to do jobs for you that your own workers would charge more to do. The problem here is, of course, that the people you outsource to must manage to keep their workforce cheap enough to make it attractive for you to send them work. Capitalism works on the basis of profit maximisation and is, in its pure form, completely amoral. So, slavery or quasi-slavery (and such cost saving measures as the use of child labour) makes perfect capitalistic sense, while paying proper wages will have the effect of reducing the profit margin so much that the company will either have to set its rates higher or settle for sharply reduced profits. So, ultimately, the company will either price itself out of the market or else it will reduce its profits so much that it will no longer be an attractive business operation – unless it cuts costs in every way possible, worker safety, environment, and so on. Or else (and this is not mutually exclusive to what I just mentioned) it exploits the workers in every way possible, such as the sweatshops companies like Adidas and Nike use all over South East Asia on the plea that the locals are at least earning more than they otherwise would.

Now that last has an interesting corollary. Suppose that outsourcing actually improved the living conditions of the local workforce so much that their lifestyles included enough consumption to make it necessary for them to spend more, so they move on to better jobs. Ultimately, the people employing the call centre or whatever will find cheaper venues in other countries that will do the job cheaper, and will move there. Which means that the cycle begins again in the third country and on, in a constant search for even cheaper options in order to drive one’s own profits up and up. And this is another important reason for employers to keep their own staff as underpaid as possible. If staff are paid only just enough for them to hesitate to change jobs, and no more, or if one has some kind of hold over them, they can be used indefinitely and the foreign sources of business won’t move on. If you can’t do that, if your workforce is too highly educated to be kept under slave wage conditions, then you cut down on “nonessentials” like security and so on.

Expect more murders and more useless media hullabaloo.    

Try again.

Back in the sixteenth century, in Hungary, there was a Countess Elizabeth Báthory. She lived in a castle at Čachtice, Hungary, and in the years between 1585 and her arrest at the end of December 1610 is thought to have murdered from “several hundred” up to 650 young girls and women, whom she enticed into her castle on the excuse of employment. Some of the methods she used to kill them were, according to witnesses,

• severe beatings over extended periods of time, often leading to death.
• burning or mutilation of hands, sometimes also of faces and genitalia.
• biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other bodily parts.
• freezing to death.
• starving of victims.

Why did she do all this? She wasn’t stupid or dumb – she ran the castle and its estates in the stead of her husband, who was off fighting the Turks, and she was literate in four languages. She wasn’t casually venting her boredom by killing young women for fun, either. So why?

Apart from simple sadism, she was rumoured to have bathed in the blood of her victims to renew her youth – virgin’s blood being a rejuvenator par excellence, it appears. So listen to me, boys and girls – it’s not wise to be cherry. Pay heed.

After her arrest, which followed years of accusations and rumours, she was never brought to trial – although three of her accomplices were tortured to death and one was sentenced to life imprisonment. She spent the rest of her life, four years, in her castle under house arrest. It's said she was walled up in a single room with no access to the world but a slit for food or water, but I somehow doubt that. Given what she was allowed to get away with, I'm sure the circumstances of her imprisonment would have been somewhat less uncomfortable.

I guess it’s always paid to be stinking rich. Even more then than now.    

They call it “female circumcision”, but it isn’t.

A recurrent theme in my writings – because it’s something I see so often and so repeatedly expressed – is the fundamentally anti-sexual nature of religion and religious practices. And when I mean anti-sexual, I mean anti-woman, because virtually all religious measures to suppress sexuality primarily target women. About the only exception I know to this rule are the members of some Hindu sects who drive spikes and so on through their penises to kill sexual ability – and, it would seem to follow (in their minds at least) sexual desire.

Now, another repeated motif of human civilisation through the ages has been the modification of the human body. Tattoos, body piercing, body painting and so on have been going on so long as there have been human beings on the planet. Another little thing that has been going on since ancient times is circumcision, the ancient practice that the Egyptians probably borrowed from the West Africans who have been doing it since at least five thousand years, and which involves the removal of the foreskin from the penis. It’s often thought the Jews invented circumcision and were copied in turn by the Muslims, but it is just not so. It’s far older than that.

Of course, circumcision as I just described it is for males only, and it’s claimed to have health benefits. I’m not quite sure how some of those health benefits, those claiming circumcision stops HIV and so on, will play out with further research. And it does decrease the sensitivity of the glans. But I’m circumcised, and I can personally attest to the efficacy of circumcision in one respect. I was a long time sufferer of a problem known as phimosis which made me functionally just about impotent and which was cured by circumcision. Otherwise I’d have remained a virgin to this day.

Now, of course, body modifications aren’t restricted to men. Women are, perhaps naturally, as much or more prone to bodily adornment as males. And that’s all fine – just as long as it’s voluntary. And, of course, as long as it does no actual harm.

There is one extremely cruel rite of female body modification which is not (normally, at least) voluntary and which is definitely not harmless. They call it “female circumcision”, but that’s a misnomer, a euphemism if you like. A much better term for it would be female genital mutilation (FGM), and that’s how I intend to refer to it henceforth in this post.

Female circumcision, the partial or total cutting away of the external female genitalia, has been practiced for centuries in parts of Africa, generally as one element of a rite of passage preparing young girls for womanhood and marriage. Often performed without anaesthetic under septic conditions by lay practitioners with little or no knowledge of human anatomy or medicine, female circumcision can cause death or permanent health problems as well as severe pain. Despite these grave risks, its practitioners look on it as an integral part of their cultural and ethnic identity, and some perceive it as a religious obligation.

This mutilation may be of various forms (check this link for details): it may involve cutting off of part or all of the clitoris – the only organ in the human body (of either sex) whose exclusive function is to give pleasure. It may involve partial or total removal of the labia as well. In extreme cases the entire labia would be removed and the vagina sewed shut, leaving a small opening for urine and menstrual blood.

Now, recall what I said about culture and practices a few days ago. Then I was talking of the eating of a songbird, which, as a result of this eating, had become endangered, and I’d mentioned in passing, hunting heads – a “cultural” practice which had been banned and forced out of existence.

And also remember what I said just above about the fundamentally anti-female nature of religious practice. Here we have those two hoary old shibboleths, religion and culture, coming together with another ugly little dweller in our collective cupboard – male chauvinism. Collectively, they created a bastard child – FGM.

So, what’s the rationale behind female genital mutilation? It’s that other issue all wrapped up in tradition and “culture” – female “purity” and “honour”, which are equated with female celibacy. Now which woman is mostly likely to remain celibate? The woman who gets no pleasure out of sex at all, right? And in a relationship, which woman is – by this viewpoint – most likely to remain faithful to her man? The woman who gets no pleasure at all out of intercourse, so that she can’t think of any reason to have sex with anyone except the man to whom she has been given – and that out of a sense of duty.   

So, FGM is, shorn of all the verbiage about religion and culture, just a way of depriving women of sexual pleasure in order to make them subservient to the male. That’s it. It’s the female version of the Hindu who wraps his penis round a stick to kill all sensation in it by destroying the nerves. But it’s not voluntary.

With regard to something else, I had said, let me quote myself: It’s long been my opinion that left alone, any society will inevitably gravitate towards liberalism. It’s only a society that feels itself under threat that looks towards fundamentalism and conservatism.   

A culture that thinks it’s under threat of physical liquidation by another will usually retreat to its roots and drag out stuff from its basement that it would never normally have looked at again, dust it off, and enforce it – because it’s part of that culture’s tradition.

In Mau Mau From Within, General Karari Njama (one of the very few educated men to have taken part in the Kenyan anticolonialist revolt) speaks of how initiates into the ranks of the Mau Mau had to swear an oath that, among other things, required them to vow to have their daughters “circumcised”. Njama wrote of how it made him, as an educated person, uncomfortable, but he accepted it because it was part of the anti-British uprising, as well as the cultural baggage of his Kikuyu people. He said he wouldn’t have actually “circumcised” his daughters, but it’s a moot point, because at the time he did not have any.

Of course, in this world, religion is used as a cover for a lot of appalling things, and it’s not too surprising that it’s been brought in to justify female circumcision as well. So, FGM is often associated with Islam – though it’s not exclusive to Islam, many mullahs have at various times said that it’s part of what the Prophet Muhammad prescribed and hence an integral part of the religion. Apart from the question of whether backing FGM is liable to improve the status of Islam in the eyes of the disinterested observer, it’s not even agreed among the mullahs as to whether FGM has any place in Islam. For a discussion on Islam and FGM, as well as the Prophet Muhammad’s views, see here (you may need to click on "skip this ad" in the top right hand corner before you can see the page itself).

And it's not just Islam:

Female circumcision is currently practiced in at least 28 countries stretching across the center of Africa north of the equator; it is not found in southern Africa or in the Arabic-speaking nations of North Africa, with the exception of Egypt. Female circumcision occurs among Muslims, Christians, animists and one Jewish sect, although no religion requires it.

Nowadays, FGM is officially banned in most countries, even in Africa. With Eritrea having banned it and Egypt planning to ban it, only Somalia, which has no central government, and Sudan still hold it legal. But given the fact that it’s mostly done informally by untrained practitioners, the ban has very little actual meaning.

Girls in Somalia are circumcised before the age of five years, usually by female family members, although it is also performed legally there in some hospitals. Uncircumcised women are seen as unclean. The most common procedure is "fibulation," which involves removing and suturing most external genital tissue (i.e. the most extreme form of FGM), leaving only a posterior opening. In 1995, it was estimated that 98 percent of Somali women had undergone female genital mutilation.

Get this clear, it’s not the East African equivalent of a ring in your vulva. No.

Of course the opening can’t remain closed like that either. Just depriving a woman of all sexual pleasure isn’t enough. Once the woman is wed, her vagina needs to be cut open again for sexual intercourse – joyless for her and painful to boot. And then when she gets pregnant – as she will, given the fact that in these cultures women are thought to be baby producing machines – the vaginal opening has to be cut open even further to allow birth of the baby. They call it the "three feminine sorrows".

Compared to this the less extreme forms of FGM might almost look like good deals, but we shouldn’t fall into that trap. Whether it’s just the prepuce of the clitoris being removed or the entire female external genitals being cut away, and whether it’s done by a specialist in a hospital or by an older woman with a rusty knife, the procedure has absolutely no benefits and no indisputable religious sanction, something that doesn’t, of course, stop some “religious leaders” from shoving their oar in. You can’t cut away any of a little girl’s vulva and say you have the right to do it. You don’t. Period.    

Incidentally, please notice that the older female family members are the ones who were most often the practitioners of this barbarity. No wonder that

despite the social pressures to continue the tradition, many women who have undergone female genital mutilation believe the most important of her sorrows is the loss of trust--a sense of betrayal by her own mother.

It also proves yet another point I’ve repeated ad nauseam – women are their own worst enemies in the battle for equality. If the women would refuse to do it, do you imagine FGM would survive?    

Now, where I stand in this is as follows: personally, I think blocking someone’s access to sexual pleasure, whether temporarily or permanently, and especially so as a part of a power trip, is a crime against humanity. And, yes, just because it’s not from my culture doesn’t mean I can’t say it’s wrong.

Hell, this is one of the things that make me believe there might be something called absolute evil, after all.

There is a boy.

He's a young boy, allegedly five years old (he is of th